I made about 10k off sales from a WordPress theme over the course of about a year. Not that much money, but it's a GREAT feeling to wake up in the morning and see money in your account. I'd be walking through the mall with my girlfriend at the time and tell her, "just sold a premium copy! want ice cream?" Very, very motivating. It gets to the point that you get a "taking-candy-from-a-baby" feeling that leads you to really try and improve your product day-after-day, to keep your initial customers happy, and to get more sales.

So, I agree that a niche software product you're actually passionate about will help. I happened to be in a fortunate position where a demand existed for a one-off product I had created a while back, all I had to do was fill the void. Customers were already looking to me for it. I feel like a total fucking idiot for not doing it sooner. I could have made probably 3x the money, just guestimating. Find something that inspires you personally, because that is what will push you to completing it.

I got laid off from a startup position that was caving in. I had a small severance to live off of, and had always wanted to build this idea. Unfortunately while at the startup I was also working on a second one on the side (death, I know) so I never really had time to do anything but those two things. Getting laid off was perfect. I sprinted as hard as I possibly could for 3 weeks, designing, coding, and building a sale site with a mini activation server. It was loads of fun. It was also very exciting to look back on those three weeks and realize that I had done a great job making the right decision when hit with a small road block. Asking myself things like, "Where does this fit with the 80/20 rule? Can I launch this feature in a second update a week later? Do I need it at all? Oh, wait, these two features can easily be combined into one. The technology behind the two won't be nearly as cool, but users will probably prefer it." All of that, I feel, is what lead to my success. Getting the product out as soon as possible, without cutting any essential corners. We've all heard it before, but living it was great. I guess I pretty much built my own "nano" startup.

Usually if something is easy, fast and worry free to get to that kind of wage, which is very comfortable living in the vast majority of locations, there are probably many people attempting to do said thing.

Really you need to leverage some kind of skills to go after something either outside the low hanging fruit, or create something that people wouldn't have considered to have a good enough market. Of course there is an element of luck, if you can make some apps and get them to take off, the mobile ad market seems to be like the early web advertising at the moment, probably returning above the mark. Something like this for example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870960

Create a product and sell subscriptions. Even at a low price point, if you offer something people are willing to pay for on a recurring basis, you'll end up with a steady and growing income stream. Niche products work here - find an itch in a niche market you participate in, scratch it, and then charge other people to have you scratch the itch for them.

I've done side/hobby projects of both the ad-driven and subscription-driven flavors, and the subscription-driven stuff gets a lot more profitable a lot faster. It does incur additional stress, because you have direct paying customers to take care of, but depending on the nature of the product, it might not need that much support. On the flip side, it's friggin' amazing to watch payments come in on a daily basis, then look back in a week and realize that you've got your rent paid for.

What you're really looking for is a product. I'll even wager you are probably looking for a product that requires minimal unit production and distribution costs. That puts you in a class of products that are electronic, or products that you can convert from an electronic representation to a physical one and have a supplier to deal with those physical challenges (like shipping) for you. People often forget the 2nd option, but it's there.

A short list of items that meet this qualification: software, writing (books, novellas, blogs, etc.), digital art, digital photography, music (original), sound of other types (background sounds that can be used in the production of music, for example), designs/instructions (for building something) and a probably a bunch of other stuff. If I missed a big one, please reply to this post with it. You should also be looking for free resources online that you can leverage. Are there free services that you can leverage to make your business easier to manage? Can you do some work (collection or processing) of some freely available data that might give it additional value which you can then extract through sales or in some other way?

Because your goal is to make a living and give yourself some extra freedom, you don't have to overengineer this. This isn't your masterpiece. It doesn't have to be pretty or break new ground necessarily. Don't chrome plate it if you're writing software for it or to support it.

Frankly, I just started taking advantage of this type of business and I feel almost guilty. The code isn't that great. The idea isn't that great. It's not something to write home about in terms of engineering a solution. But it makes me money even if I don't touch it for a month at a time. I'm not living off this business yet, but I am seeing good growth and I see a virtually infinite path to expanding the digitally based offerings of the business (more offerings = more money).

Conscience is the word you want. And cash flow is not the same thing as income. There's an old Monty Python sketch called "How To Do It" where the explanation of how to get rich is "First, get lots of money."

So I'm not sure if you're asking what are some business investments or you're asking about financial vehicles that can generate $2K/month of cashflow off of $1M of initial investment.

One option during this down market is to purchase rental property, you'll have to do some digging but the most depressed markets are 70% off of their peaks and most pros will tell you it won't drop much more than that (but it's not ZERO risk). You need to crunch the numbers and then renovate and find tenants but I know of a few small investors that own 15-20 rental properties and can generate ~10% margins monthly and you have the potential upside of property appreciation.

If you don't want to deal too much with getting hands on and managing a business, it's conceivable to be pretty low-risk to go with high dividend / low growth blue chip stocks. For example, AT&T is at $29/share right now. It's been paying $.42/share per quarter so about $1.60/year. It'll move around a bit but assume that they won't get screwed when the iPhone goes multi-carrier, you are talking about $1M for 34,483 shares which will pay $13,793/quarter in dividends alone which is $4,597 per month. Assume 40% taxation rate and you're $2,758 post taxes. You can use any finance site to screen for companies with high dividend yields. Keep in mind that high dividend usually means low risk of stock price movement but there is still risk.

I take a multi stream approach to the problem. Half my income comes from a web app I built (task.fm) and the other half from my personal site - I just review the books I read and products I use and earn through affiliate commissions. A couple of pages on my personal site make over $500 a month in commissions, because they are highly targeted (first result in Google).

Seems like the common thread here is to 'start a web app, charge a recurring fee'...

Any suggestions for such an app that people here would find useful and willing to pay, say, $10 a month for, that would be small enough to be developed by one guy? I can't think of any ideas off the top of my head.

The right question to ask is 'how do I become a GOOD coder?' -- the answer there is also straightforward, but time consuming: Spend ten years writing code. (Five years is enough to be employable, but it takes another five before you stop being "that guy who wrote all the bugs we keep on finding".)

There really aren't any shortcuts, no matter what booksellers try to make you think.

To become a good coder you need to learn how to code for other people. Unless you plan on being the only programmer on a website/for a product forever... Your code will need to be understandable to someone else. Sometimes that someone else is you, 18 months down the road.

A good way to start if it's just you, is to learn the style of other good programmers. Concentrate on one area and one language only. Each language has it's known/preferred dialects. If you jump around too much you'll get confused. This is where posting stuff to GitHub or similar helps - other people in that language will review and if they like what they see, branch and contribute.

In your situation, just concentrate on what you need to do. You can get great guidance on StackOverflow about almost any problem you need to solve, and I'd strongly suggest you do that until you get to the point where the answers there are similar to what you'd intended to to.

This is too bad. I had not had time to stop by there for about a month but it's a really great place and if you live in or near SF you should check it out. I've signed up for a monthly donation. Hopefully others will follow and Noisebridge will do a better job of keeping the community informed of their financial situation. (Put you monthly intake on the homepage or the intranet that unlocks the door) No one likes to ask for money but there is a generous community of people out there and I hope we can do what it takes to keep the lights on.

- Need to get the examples included with Monkeybars (http://monkeybars.org) up to date, so I'll likely clean up one or two, and see how annoying that is. I suspect what's broken for one is broken for all.

- Started playing with using Monkeybars to talk to my Kinect; data manipulation is too slow in JRuby, so I will explore Mirah as a nicer alternative to using Java when speed is needed.

- I'm due to give a preso at the next AZ Hackers meeting (http://azhackers.com) so I have to do something with my Lilypad Arduino. Been hitting a wall on Bluetooth, so might just have an accelerometer drive some blinky lights. (Ultimately I want this to drive some OSC-friendly apps.)

My somewhat unrealistic goal is to build a profitable web app completely on heroku's free level of hosting. I'm not even sure I'm going to buy a domain name, I might just try to get a catchy bit.ly or tinyurl address.

I've been on winter break from school for the past two weeks, and I've been spending a lot of my time beginning to fix bugs in Chromium, and I've also been honing my graphic/web design skills, studying type, element placement, CSS, JQuery etc.

Depends. Let me start by addressing the HTML/javascript toolchains out there: they suck. One of my clients has experience of this. The first thing they tried was using one of those javascript/html systems. Its a fairly simple app that one would think was ideal for HTML/javascript, but it was barely usable and tech support was awful. Thats why they hired me.

What platforms are your target - the "etc" you mention? Blackberry? Blackberry is still huge but by iPhone and Android standards they are hardly smartphones. How about WP7? Interesting but so far tiny.

Next question: what kind of app? If its games, you use C/C++ and OpenGL for Android and iPhone.

Personally, I use C# and manage core business logic libraries with platform-specific user interfaces in Silverlight, MonoTouch and MonoDroid. I have a client who wants Android and later Blackberry, so for that we do the Android version in "normal" java so we can share libs with Blackberry in the future.

I don't think there's a one size fits all. The ones that do (e.g. Flash, or HTML/javascript) end up looking or running like ass.

I am currently trying jQuery Mobile - which is promising but at the current alpha stage there are rather too many issues at the moment to commit to it. However I do think that this framework has all the right signs for the future.<edit> link here http://jquerymobile.com/ </edit> Oh and Jo looks interesting as well http://joapp.com/ </>

You should look into Appcelerator Titanium (http://www.appcelerator.com/) and PhoneGap (http://www.phonegap.com/). They allow you to build native mobile apps using HTML/JavaScript, by exposing device specific API's (camera, location, address book etc.) to JavaScript.

Hi:I got a reply by mail, then a follow-up call with a very friendly chimp. My project is probably not a perfect fit, but it was designed to help startups and I had planned to subsidize the service to free with the funds.

It's been a week or so with no follow-up, so probably not in.

But, I love this movement of successful companies giving back to the startup community. Good press, good business, good will with future customers.

In my case, I'm in the process of setting a phone call with a certain chimp. :PMy project could potentially help MailChimp get more potential customers, not a new concept.. hopefully I can draft out a decent delivery plan on the idea.

I think both MailChimp and Twilio did really well in this aspect to give back to the community.

I was actually just thinking about this the other day. I think it could be very useful to see full profiles and detailed portfolios of the people on here. I think it could help members network with each other more.

The benefit is that because HN/YC is such a small, focused niche site if it became a full-fledged social network, all of the members would become much closer in the online community.

If you want to change something, then it's up to you to do it. It's hard work, but it can be done. Plus, we will never agree with you (because there is too big a range of views to ever be put under a name like we).

2) You are very wrong about the change that has happened.

In the 2004 election Howard Dean was the early favorite for the Democratic primaries because of his huge internet following. In the 2008 election Barak Obama won the democratic nomination and the presidency on a campaign mostly financed by individual donations over the internet. In the 2010 mid-term elections Tea-Party backed Republicans won a huge number of seats based on the Tea Party organizing support on the internet.

3) Change happens in the small. If you want to change everything, find one, small, specific thing and work at it every day until you change it. You'd be surprised at how much else you'd change along the way.

Technocracy. I'm not convinced that politicians, bankers, and lawyers can solve the problems our society will face in the coming years. The problem is, things haven't gotten bad enough for true change to be possible. They just keep kicking the can down the road.

You cannot change anything until you understand the cause of your problems.

The structure of political systems determines the range of possible outcomes. We have a political system that structurally has an unusually large number of veto points (compared to similar western nations). The result is that change is slow and the system is resistant to external forces. In addition, we have a system that systematically overrepresents the interests of rural counties.

There is a relatively "easy" way to fix the second problem: states with large populations should start splitting into multiple states. But due to status quo bias such "simple" changes are unlikely to ever happen. Fixing the veto points problem is harder still: it is wired into the fabric of American governance.

"our roles and interactions with government. I realized that not much has changed despite the surge of Internet users over the last decade."--> a variety of inefficiencies that will be corrected one of these days...maybe by a number of us?

" Decisions are not made with the best interest of constituents in mind. "think about the polling systems that are still in place. they call up landlines -- LANDLINES! the only people that are being sampled are our grandparents...

"And despite services like Facebook and Twitter many of us feel like we don't have a voice. "government hasn't exactly integrated social software/services. one of these days...

"So my question to the smartest people in the room is, how can this be better? "i think one of the biggest issues is the epidemic of groupthink/influence that is plastered all over politics. if opinions were submitted behind an anonymous software, i think a lot of the problems would be mitigated.

we've actually got the chief of staff for the majority WHIP in GA approaching his government friends about leveraging our ranking software to address many of the issues you mentioned. happy to speak more about it with you outside of HN as we're just beginning to explore the space & the potential impact.

I don't use tumblr, but I do know the geeky early adopters have been bored with facebook for a long time and twitter for a shorter time. They (and me) are all looking for the hip new thing, maybe it's Tumblr. On a completely anecdotal note, I have heard tumblr mentioned on several podcasts recently.

Who sees Facebook as "professional?" It strikes me as a haven for noise from stupid games and ridiculous apps that are trivially amusing at best.

I can't help but think that if the world needs another social network (something I am not sure of in the first place) that one niche that needs to be filled is "useful social network;" something for professionals who are looking to get work done. Yeah, LinkedIn touches on that, but seems to be more about cataloging connections than about collaborating with people.

Anyway, what - in you guys' mind - would make a site (say, Tumblr) "hip and cool" where Facebook isn't?

regardless of what oldstrangers is claiming, I think its very possible for Facebook to be unseated especially amongst the hipster, younger, more fickle crowd. I hear people continuously making the claim people don't want to keep creating their social graph, or entering their data over again, but I think history proves this is untrue. People will invite their friends and find friends on different sites, and will be created over again.

Investments (like all deals) often dangle on the edge until the ink is dry. Anything relatively trivial thing you can do to increase the odds of it working out is probably worth it. If raising money is just a few months out then I'd definitely go for the Delaware C Corp.

It sounds like you haven't even talked to investors yet. You don't need a corporation to create a TOS, nor do you need a corporation to accept payments.

Cross those bridges when you get there. I don't see this leverage you keep referring to. They restructure businesses all the time. Having the right incorporation doesn't make your startup/idea/business any better, so why don't you focus on improving those things?

A C-corp makes more sense at a certain scale and when targeting specific types of investors, but an LLC can accept investment from new members. The terms would ordinarily be incorporated into an operating agreement.

My impressions is that the politics of HN have changed drastically in the last nine months or so.

Back then, the orthodoxy was an odd kind of left coast right-wing politics. You know, the young people who've never worked a real job and think Ayn Rand is really awesome, but they don't hate gays or mexicans.

If you went against that orthodoxy back then, you'd get viciously downvoted.

It seems that the politics of HN is much more diverse and tolerant now, and you can actually express the opinion that there might be some drawbacks of an extreme inequality of wealth.

I have been very pleased with my own work. I syndicated my startup by hand and got over 50 reviews, mentions, tweets, and backlinks. I got a few hundred visitors and a handful of signups. But it took me awhile and it was godawful boring. I wish I had met the Magical MoFo earlier! My fingers would be less withered and my hair less grey.

It's a nice idea. Perhaps though, you could have a listing of startups who have used your service. For example, the other day I was looking to see if there's any new startups in my city (I'm in New Zealand). Sadly, I couldn't find much, nor for the rest of the country.

the whois also has nameservers pointing to their webhost:webhostingplan.com.au

You could try sending the webhost a DMCA takedown notice notifying them that 1whp.com is displaying your copyrighted content. Although any host that displays Adwords (with a "Dont forget to check out the competition before deciding on us :)" message that probably violates Google's TOS) is pretty spammy themselves, and they appear to be Australian so probably aren't too fussed about US copyright legislation.

Or remove the splog's reason for existence by sending the DMCA takedown notice to Google...

I once had a similar problem. I just sent a stern email to the domain provider, who sorted it out for me. Legal action is probably too much of a time and money sink for such trivial annoyances. But just threatening with legal action works.

I wouldn't worry about this too much. Google does a good job when it comes to spotting the difference between you and these guys.

As far as serving junk content to that IP, its a waste of time. As your blog gets more popular you'll start getting more and more people ripping your content. The time you spend trying to beat these guys is better used elsewhere.

My advice, get a few high quality links going to your domain, this will come naturally over time. It will really let the search engines know which domain is the authority and which domains are just stealing content.

Politely contact @dahowlett and talk to him. www.accmanpro.com. Former Chartered Accountant. He knows stuff and will not BS you. Read his Twitter stream first. Read his blog first. Go back as far as you can in your research. He does not suffer fools or lazy people.

Given that the language itself is so very mundane, I'd recommend implementing a fun and challenging project of your own choice -- in Java, of course. Preferably one that won't consist of plugging framework A into framework B.

Language-centric tutorials won't get you far in Java because there's not much to discover. Python or Scheme or Haskell elicit a "Wow!" every now and then. Java is all about libraries, tools and ecosystem. It's a language that very much disappears behind its immediate surroundings -- counteract that by extensively using the language.

So go and grab that Play!-thing, and build something reasonably awesome.

I was in the same boat as you when leaving college â€"Â I knew the Java _language_, but I didn't really know _Java._ Prior to my first job I always thought of Java as "that big ugly language," but after a few years there I really started to get it.

The only Java program of any consequence I wrote was a multiagent autonomous robot simulator (sounds more complicated than it actually was :-) for an experiment in independent agents. It was fun, but after I was done, there was absolutely no motivation left to continue and I soon got into Python instead.

Java is simply not a "fun" language! If you're a student and looking for a job, knowing the language basics is enough, no one hiring out of school will expect you to be an expert. Much more important to know the OO principles it's supposedly based on.

I was learning Java at work but also picked up Ruby on the side to do some scripting work at the same job. Through Ruby I learned truly about first class functions, closures, etc and then took that knowledge over to Java. I also highly recommend the first edition of the Ruby "pick axe" book. It is a great OOP book.

I still use Balsamiq exclusively. None of the other tools offer the sort of additional features that would make me switch.

Omnigraffle isn't specifically a wireframing tool, but is very popular with Mac and iPad users.

Axure RP is also popular, but its price tag seems steep compared to what it delivers to individual designers.

I've considered ForeUI for the cases where I want to be able to build interactive prototypes, as well as CogTool for when I've wanted to measure tasks, but have not actually used either.

I recently did a set of wireframes in iMockups for iPad and was exceedingly disappointed in its visual style, the way the tools and interactions worked and the export functionality. I would not recommend it.

- Complex documentation generation. I need to be able design wireframes and then break them down into components and output multiple types of documentation for the different teams that will be using them, in formats that can be emailed and read on iPhones and on Windows. Comprehensive docs for management are not as useful as targeted component-describing docs for implementers, and vice-versa.

- Hosted integration for artists and engineers. The graphic designers' comprehensive layouts become the source of truth for the design after my hand-off, because there's no easy way to flip back and forth between a wireframe and a design, nor between broken-apart, reusable visual components and their art. I also want developer IDE integration so technical teams can annotate the wireframes and animations with implementation details, so the documents stay "live" throughout the entire production workflow.

i use mockupscreens http://www.mockupscreens.com/. its quick and easy to get your idea down but simple enough that you arent conveying to viewers that you are already "done" or that things are frozen. its cheap, like $80 for single and like $300 for a team if you need it.

Another very happy Balsamiq user here, first step though is always a white board and a camera, really fast iteration there, then work in Balsamiq once the really high level wire frame is done and you are getting to the detail level

A better way for Hacker News to handle password resets is to send the original email address associated with the account an email containing a one-time, expiring link allowing the user to change their password from. Otherwise, your password would remain unchanged.

The admins probably have access to that info. I don't see how its going to help you though. If it was a malicious hack attempt then the person is probably running it through proxy or using dynamically allocated IPs making the IP addr worthless without a court order from a court in the country that has jurisdiction over the ISP/proxy.

Likewise with your company blog. Put a prominent, descriptive link to the main site at the top. It's too common that I have to go to the address bar and remove "blog." to get to the main page. Most people won't do this.

I'll add that if you have invite e-mails that people can send to friends, you better explain your startup in the e-mail. I've received invites from legit startups that looked exactly the same as spam invites that I've received.

And please, just one e-mail. Don't let a rambunctious new marketing type decide "Hey, if we find our inactive users and email them two or three times a week from here on out we'll increase our user base". And make sure your unsubscribe features work.

The first thing we were taught in the business and formal communication class (mandatory for freshmen at my university) is that in the body of an official letter, the first paragraph is essentially a small pitch of your company or product. I found it stupid at first but then in the third lecture I asked the question "But why?" and the professor gave just that reason. Customers and even other business which provide raw materials, tool or purchase your product/service might not remember who you are even if there is a gap of a week in your communication.

This is something that I seem to disagree with a lot of people on. Dupe-police have existed on reddit, digg, slashdot, here, and just about every other social bookmarking website I've ever used (including my own).

I hate them. Why? Because the entire point of social bookmarking is to find things you find interesting, not things that you find unique. That little arrow to the left of the title means "I found this link interesting. I think other people will find it interesting as well."

It absolutely does not mean "This link is unique. Nobody has seen it before." If that were the point, we could just pipe RSS feeds into the URL submitter, couldn't we?

The very fact that links are appearing on the front page means that a lot of people haven't seen them yet. It means that they got some utility out of reading them, and it means that they thought others would too.

Sometimes, dupes are good. I don't remember who said it, but that Louis CK interview that gets posted every once in a while, where he is talking about how we're surrounded by wonderful technology and yet nobody cares, they said something to the effect of "I wouldn't care if this was stickied to the top of the page and everybody had to watch it every single day before they post. He is making an excellent point."

Now, I think this is a bit excessive, but the point stands. It isn't about being unique, it is about being good.

I found your bot really annoying. I don't need someone telling me there is another submission with no points and no comments.

It almost felt petty, that you were scolding the submitter for submitting content that had already been submitted. The comments section of Hacker News is one of the last places on the web that has not been hammered with noise.

I would be somewhat interested in how you solved this problem automatically though.

I think a bot which references submissions that already have comments would be incredibly useful, especially on duplicate submissions that don't have comments but received a few upvotes. I don't think you should reference duplicate submissions without comments, that just seems pointless. I don't think that dupes by themselves are bad, but stumbling across a story which was already richly discussed on HN in the past without being able to find that discussion is certainly not optimal.

I also think you should work on the bot's politeness. It's easy to perceive the waltzing in of a bot that says nothing but â€śThis submission has ended up with the points and commentsâ€ť and provides a link as rude. Technically, sure, that sentence is not or at least not overtly negative but it is easy to perceive it as such.

I would formulate the bot's phrases consciously positive, showing that your intent is not to be smug about submitters of dupes but that you just want to help, you just want to provide a service.

My claim was that HN should bake in a "dup" button that let users flag duplicate posts, not with the goal of removing dups, but with the goal of cross-referencing them (and possibly sharing karma or some other idea). I won't recap the whole thing here, but I find DupDetector an interesting complement to those ideas.

I actually was really excited when I saw this originally. I made a point of going through all the bots posts to see what you were doing with it. I got the impression that you were trying to tweak the bot to the point that people would find it interesting. So for me it is sad to hear that things aren't working out. I was hoping that DupDetector would eventually be pointing to year old discussion pages; a discoverer instead of a detector. It was only links to the articles that didn't gain any traction that bothered me. They seemed like noise.

I've been seeing an increasing number of duplicates myself, including entries using the same URL with an octothorpe added at the end -- a pretty obvious ploy, in my mind.

When HN started up, it was about the conversation. If someone else had already posted a link, great: People just joined in the conversation there if they had something to say. From my perspective, it saved the time of having to post it. And, in that I was often learning as much or more from the conversation on HN than from the links themselves, I was happy to find that conversation focused in one thread.

I'm not sure how, but I'd like to see the site steered back in that direction, if possible. (I have a few half-baked "ideas", but PG and crew have already demonstrated themselves to be more insightful than me -- in my own mind.)

I do think identifying the HN member behind DupDetector might be a benefit, to demonstrate their investment in the community and therefore, in my mind at least, credibility. Yes, I see the email address now, and I half remember off the top of my head whose domain that is. But I might have been a bit more supportive if I knew who was behind it and that they had an established, positive history with HN.

I had no issue with you running it, I think the negative response were people reacting out of fear of letting "novelty" accounts get going with this as the beachhead where they had to make their stand.

I agree with the people saying "market it better." As it is, DupDetector looks like linkspam and is thus ripe for angry downvotes.

Change the focus from strict dupe-finding to "add additional context to the article people are already looking at." Copy some data about the comments, note the age of the previous discussions, even reproduce the highest-rated comment. These things will give it a more positive/helpful image.

I was watching this with interest, actually. I think it would be great to somehow tie threads together. blhack is right when he says that social bookmarking is about finding things interesting, not unique, so dupes aren't evil in themselves. It's the dilution of discussion that's the issue. So if you can solve that issue elegantly, you win.

I think the idea is really interesting and itself is very HN. The thing getting you down is the way people misuse the down vote.

Disagreeing with something is no reason to down vote a comment. I'm only at ~100 karma, but I'm not waiting to get to 500 to down vote people I disagree with. Disagreement spurs discussion. It'd be pretty boring if everyone agreed on everything.

Since you have to be "qualified" to use the down vote, it should be reserved for instances where the user is not being a respectful fellow hacker.

All that being said, maybe you can include a line saying "Just a bot doing research" before it lists the duplicates.

I agree that there's just a slight miss re: HN style and community behavior, and also think that it's a beneficial service. Does the robot update the comments automatically?

I wonder what people would make of you using your 'real' account with a note that it's a robot posting. On some sites this would be considered karma whoring, but maybe here it would get a better response?

Simply stating "More comments here..." then showing the additional submissions may have a better response. HN isn't so much a discussion among a few friends (although it feels that way at times) as much as large public park where people come in and out at all different times. The fact that topics repeat (at least some) isn't such a bad thing.

A near-simultaneous dup does divide discussion. It would be better if only one was allowed. Quite often, breaking news is divided among two or three posts.

Dups that are distant in time are more complex. One aspect is thatpeople might not have seen the previous stroy - so it would be good to show it again. Another aspect is that the previous discussion is lost, leading to the same points being repeated, instead of (possibly) being built upon - so it would be better to resurrect the previous submission and therefore discussion.

One solution is to detect and combine dups, but enable them to launch the story fresh, if sufficient time has passed.

There is in fact already a discrete implementation of this: stories over a year old (I think that's the period) can be resubmitted as a new story. So I'm suggesting a continuous version of this idea, where the "newness" of a story gradually increases, til it becomes completely new after a year. "Newness" could be implemented with a factor on the story-score. This would enable old stories (and their discussions) to return to the front-page.

What method are you using to conclude that two stories on two different sites are about the same topic? That's always been a feature of certain sites that captured my interest, but it seems like so much can go wrong. Achieving decent accuracy must be very difficult. Have you written about this anywhere?

When I first saw the dup detector working, I thought that this was an interesting problem, and one that I want to see solved. I have often posted a comment on the losing thread only to see that this was the surpassed by the next post.

In the sense of an interesting hack, it was fun and pragmatic. Thanks for doing it. But it seems that the community doesn't see the need for the service.

There were cases where the linked duplicates would have only one or two comments. It was annoying to see them listed - not because there is nothing to read, but because it's a vote of no-confidence that those particular posts would have ever grow a larger discussion.

Thanks amoore.Absolutely agree with adding as much information about your app/site as possible - especially that you were reviewed by CNET and Mashable. There are a few additional pointers available at https://flippa.com/help/sellAlso be sure to add the webapp tag to your tweetsaver.com listing.In the spirit of the season, let us know once your Flippa account is set up and we'll send $10 worth of credits your way.Hope that helps - good luck!

flippa.com seems to be pretty popular. You should read some other successful postings there and work hard on your description since you can significantly affect the amount your auction brings in by using good copy.

A popular valuation method is to use a multiple of average recent monthly profit. Depending on how much work it is to run your site, you might get 5-15 times recent monthly profit.

Also, if you send me some numbers, such as traffic, customers, revenue, and such, I'll probably make you an offer.

It's as easy as writing your code (in your browser), launch the compilation process in their systems (cloud) and automatically downloading the resulting binary file, which can be easily transfered to the device by drag&drop, since it's recognized as a usb storage device.

I got mine for free a while back and it took me few minutes to develop a simple multi-threaded application to control a few LEDs and Servos.

I was wondering about this too. But what good is being able to code in a browser unless you can actually [compile and] run your code somewhere? I can see how a browser-based editor could be great for editing JavaScript. But unless the browser also hosts or provides access to a platform for the language you're working in, what is there to be gained by coding in a browser?

It's a pretty bad strategy for hiring great programmers. Given how many cool, interesting, VC-funded startups are hiring, good developers can work literally anywhere they want. A job description that doesn't reveal the company or at least the general domain is likely to just be ignored. When I started my job board, I had a rule that the company name had to be on the posting. When I let one company avoid this rule by posting as a "stealth startup" I got tons of email complaints and the stealth startup got no applicants.

Announcing YC funding is a media event that can be leveraged, just like a launch.

They want to make use of that event and release that information at the right time, to make the right kind of splash. Chances are only their closest friends know that they have YC funding, because if it leaked to, say, TechCrunch, they would lose the advantage of being able to announce their YC funding at the most advantageous time for them.

The ideas are obviously not stealth ideas if they have 20m uniques in 6 weeks.

The question you're asking is, "why does it make sense for YC companies to be in stealth mode?" Sometimes it makes sense to be stealthy, and occasionally you need to hire folks when you're in that state. It's certainly a handicap (as spolsky says elsewhere in this thread, what kind of hotshot would want to interview without knowing ANYTHING about a company?).

Wow, did the Ask HN on "what is the YC W11 social network startup that's hiring called" get deleted? There were at least a dozen comments on it last night, it was high up the front page, and now I can't find it.

I'm glad someone else feels the same way. My angle is: these ads expect people to give up all their personal details, without revealing any of their own. I'm sure they miss out as a result. (One posting sounded almost spammy - "we're the next big social network" etc etc. No-one's gonna respond to that unless they know who you are, can check a website etc).

Edit: or maybe that's the point - if you don't know who the poster is, you're not worthy of applying.

Find it interesting, too. 'We need a dedicated person with lots of experience to work full time with uncertain perspectives on a problem that unknown "we" who probably have done nothing before believe has lots of potential. We will probably have money some time in the future too'.

Maybe I never learned the secret handshake* or something, because I was a homemaker for eons, but I find all job postings pretty opaque. So I don't see what the big deal is (that some specific piece of info is being left out).

* From what I have read, I am not so sure it's "just me". For example, I've read plenty of anecdotes where someone went in to some field with grand visions only to discover that their visions don't remotely match the day-to-day details of their actual work.